Josh Duggar and the Failures of Religious Counseling
A lot of religious-based "therapy" is fraudulent.
Content warning: this article includes details of sexual molestation in it.
Two days ago, I read an article that Josh Duggar had been arrested by U.S. marshals. I have held a special interest in the Duggars for a while now — my first-ever published article was about them, in fact — so I clicked. Federal authorities involved? No bail? No charges listed? I had no idea what it could be, but he’d remained mostly out of trouble since his scandals involving infidelity, molestation, pornography addiction, and other lawsuits over the years.
The next day, the charge was revealed: possession of child pornography. Apparently, the charges came days after Josh’s ever-suffering wife, Anna, just announced her seventh pregnancy. I was horrified, but I can’t say I was shocked. The details are still very forthcoming, but the news outlets are lit with reactions, revisiting the Duggar family scandals, reporting family statements, and more. I have a feeling that worse things will come to light, but I don’t know.
Many news sources are jumping at the bit to blame fundamentalism for Josh’s issues and predilection for such extreme and cruel life choices. Fundamentalism certainly shares the blame here: people raised in such insular environments seem more drawn to the darker sides of things, with little or no understanding of moderation and a desire to keep everything hidden at all costs. At my Christian college, students were as drawn to sex, drugs, and alcohol as any secular college. But many kids had never even seen alcohol before, or held hands with a crush, or anything like that — so was it any wonder that they would engage in sex without condoms, or have zero control over their drinking?
Instead of recycling the same point that I’m sure many other media outlets and public figures are currently making, however, I’d like to point to the immense failure of the religious counseling industry, and yes, it is an industry. They are allowed to refer to themselves as “spiritual counselors” without any state licensure whatsoever, thanks to statutes of religious freedom exceptions. They receive donations and funds from Christian churches and organizations. They hawk their services back to those same churches and organizations.
Many conservatively religious people feel as if traditional, “secular” therapy is bad, just as they feel all “secular” things are bad. If they are so fundamentalist that they are already choosing to exclusively peruse Christian media for entertainment and education at the home and any other place they can ignore the bulk of society and protect their children from any outside influence, then they certainly aren’t going to take those same children to a therapist who may just tell them that their parents’ methods and beliefs are harmful.
(As an aside: this is always the strangest part of fundamentalist societies, I believe. If you’re so sure of your beliefs, why do you fear them being challenged? Ironically, the people of more “progressive” beliefs don’t seem to shelter their children from differing beliefs AT ALL, including in my family. We tell our children all the time about things others believe, and our opinions on it, and let them educate themselves on it if they wish.)
So, instead of seeking out therapy from qualified individuals with accreditation and extensive psychological or behavioral education, they often see pastors for therapy. Pastors who might not even have an M.Div, much less anything relating to psychology. These are the exact same sort of people who would seek “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ kids. But, their harm doesn’t stop there. Religious counselors and pastors often encourage people to stay in unhappy, adulterous, or even abusive marriages because they believe divorce is almost always a sin. They encourage parents to hit or improperly discipline children who may be in need of other therapeutic intervention. They tell people the cures to mental illnesses are Jesus and the Bible, not medication. Liberal and even more moderate churches these days are becoming more open-minded about these issues, but religion-based counseling is still the top choice for many conservative Christians, and definitely for people in explicitly fundamentalist cults like the Duggars.
From 2002 to 2003, when Josh Duggar was 14 and 15, he began molesting victims — five in total were later reported to police, and many were his sisters. I don’t know how much sexual education the children had, but we can presume very little, if any. And no major fundamentalist Christian sexual education programs include any information about consent. Modesty and “purity” are the cornerstones of the teaching. The first response of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar was to punish Josh at home — they did not seek additional support or report the incidents to anyone until they continued to happen. That’s when Jim Bob sought additional help from the elders at church. Not a licensed therapist.
The elders told the Duggars to send their son to a three-month program that included physical labor and religious counseling. The details are vague, but Josh was supposedly sent to work for Bill Gothard, who founded the Institute in Basic Life Principles, which offer conservative religious programs and seminars. Gothard, a personal friend of the Duggars, was later accused of sexually harassing women himself (as well as not reporting cases of child abuse) and resigned in 2015.
When Josh came home, Jim Bob Duggar sat him down with a police officer and personal friend James Hutchens and told him about an incident of sexual molestation. This was the only report the Duggars gave to authorities, and it was an informal one — the police officer merely giving Josh a “stern warning.” He did not report the incident to anyone higher up, despite a legal mandate that said he was supposed to. Hutchens himself would later be jailed for multiple child pornography charges. At this time, the Duggars were appearing on more and more TV shows. After receiving an anonymous tip about Josh’s molestation charges, producers on The Oprah Winfrey Show canceled a scheduled Duggar appearance in 2006 and reported Josh Duggar (then 18 years old) to authorities, who finally thoroughly investigated the family. However, by that time, the statute of limitations for the charges was up, so nothing was pursued.
The public wouldn’t know of any of these incidents until 2015, when media outlets dropped their bombshell reports. By that time, Josh Duggar had gotten married to Anna Keller from another prominent Quiverfull family and had begun having kids. He had a cushy job working for the conservative thinktank Family Research Council, but resigned after the news reports came out.
Only a few weeks after Josh’s past incidents had been revealed, Gawker leaked information showing that he had been on the infidelity website Ashley Madison, and admitted that he had developed an addiction to pornography and had cheated on his wife. Around this same time, an actress and sex worker by the name of Danica Dillon filed a lawsuit, claiming that Josh Duggar had assaulted her during consensual sex. The lawsuit was settled out of court and Dillon dropped her claims.
Once again, Josh Duggar sought help through religion-based counseling. This time he went with an addiction recovery center called Reformers Unanimous, which believes Satan is the cause of all manner of personal addictions, mental illnesses, or “evil” characteristics. They have no medical qualifications to treat addiction, but rely on “spiritual training” and physical labor to “cure” addictions — which they refer to as “sin” rather than treating it as a medical condition. Instead of proven treatments with medical professionals and licensed therapists, they employ Bible studies and “hard work” as the medical cure for various addictions, including alcoholism and opioid dependency. Spoiler, and as someone who once worked in drug treatment: it doesn’t work. Regardless, Josh Duggar spent six months here. When he returned home, his “counseling” continued — with a pastor.
The child pornography incident with Josh allegedly happened in 2019, which is just four years after he completed therapy at Reformers Unanimous. He has plead not guilty to the charges, and may be granted bail in early May — though if he is released on bail, he won’t be able to reside in a house with minors, which includes basically everyone in his family. Further details of this story have yet to be seen, but I hope one conclusion we can draw is that religious counseling is… not effective for medical conditions, addictions or sexual disorders. (I hope it goes without saying that same-sex attractions and transgender identities are not disorders in the least, though they are labeled as such by religious counseling centers.)
Formerly, I might have advocated that religious therapy (at least for explicit mental illnesses and addictions) should be banned entirely, but Dr. Jennifer Mullan’s Decolonizing Therapy program has shifted my perspective slightly: such declarations might make therapy inaccessible for marginalized communities. There ARE ways that licensed therapists have included religion and spirituality in their psychotherapies in helpful ways to individualize and humanize their patients, and it’s not limited to Christianity, but many other religions as well.
However, if your unlicensed organization is profiting from therapeutic services claiming to cure anything related to “sin” that is actually a medical diagnosis? Yeah, I think that should be banned. However, thanks to most interpretations of the First Amendment, that’s unlikely to happen in the United States. We are very lucky that conversion therapy is at least partially banned throughout the country.
I have been to therapy semi-consistently since I was eight years old, and diagnosed first with generalized anxiety disorder, and then major depressive disorder. I am lucky in that my parents sought counseling for me in secular licensed settings rather than religious ones in my Pentecostal upbringing. In fact, I have been lucky enough to have only been counseled by licensed professionals. I cannot imagine how much more traumatized I would be if I had been told from a very young age that I could cure my mental illnesses by just reading the Bible more, or having the joy of the Lord, or having more faith. I doubt my faith would still be intact in 2021 if I had been through that.
Pastors and religious counselors can be helpful — for spiritual issues. If you struggle with questions of faith or existence, spiritual awakenings, religious beliefs, or other more metaphysical struggles, religious leaders and counselors can be extremely helpful and offer incredible perspectives on those issues. But religion-based counseling as a replacement for traditional counseling is ineffective at best, and actively harmful at worst, and Josh Duggar is a prime example of that.
I’m not an expert on psychology. I don’t know about the minds of sexual predators or what sort of sexual addictions or immoral activities can be prevented from therapy alone. I can imagine, however, that growing up in a home that speaks about sex openly and frankly, with focus on consent and safety and emotional health, is proven to lead to far greater outcomes than those that focus on modesty and purity and blame women for men’s urges and “mistakes.” I also know that REAL therapeutic programs do exist for people who struggle with unethical or unhealthy sexual urges, and those programs, again, offer a better outcome than religious-based ones.
The person I feel the most sorry for at the moment is Anna Duggar and her kids. Yes, people will be all too happy to blame her for her own predicament, but those of us who have studied religious fundamentalism know all too well what an impossible position these women have been put into. They almost never have any education other than the religious homeschooling their parents gave them, they have no job experience, none of their own money, and rely fully on their husband for it. They usually have more than one or two children — Anna will have seven.
Unless they have family members willing to help (and again, Anna’s family, the Kellers, are just as conservative as the Duggars) they have to rely on pure luck or someone with extraordinary resources to help them escape. Even if they have access to these escape methods, they are often trapped through spiritual abuse as well. The Quiverfull people believe divorce is wrong in every instance, period. You’re supposed to forgive your spouse repeatedly no matter what happens, and a united, large family is the most important witness to Christ. The mental constraints can trap you as hard as the financial constraints do. Most of the other Duggars who have spoken out about Josh’s charges so far have said that they are disturbing and that they hope for justice, no matter what it is. But I won’t be surprised if Anna continues, even after this, to stand by her man. I will be pleasantly surprised if that turns out to not be the case.
If Josh ends up behind bars for the maximum sentence of 20 years, she’s just as screwed as she would be if they got divorced. She will legally have to keep her children away from him unsupervised. Hopefully, under the law, Anna will not be able to count herself as one of the adults who is able to “supervise” Josh on visits with children. I hope someone steps up to offer her support, and that she eventually learns that she doesn’t need to be miserable with a man who continues to harm her, and she won’t be less of a Christian if she decides to leave. And I hope she and her family all seek out therapy — from a licensed professional.